The Roberts Court, Reinventing Government, and More: This Week in the Book Pages

The great strength of Coyle’s book is the depth and balance of her reporting. She interviewed several justices on background and one, Antonin Scalia, on the record. She also interviewed the lawyers and litigants on both sides of the four highest-profile cases of the Roberts era — involving affirmative action in public schools, gun rights, campaign finance and health care. By allowing all the participants to speak in their own voices, she gives us a nuanced sense of how conservative and libertarian lawyers strategically litigated these cases and transformed the law.

The Wall Street journal has reviews of two biographies of WWII figures. Carl Rollyson reviews Ray Monk's Robert Oppenheimer: His Life and Mind (Doubleday). "[T]he author's approach," he writes "demonstrates why previous biographers," namely Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin whose American Prometheus contained a "staggering amount of research," did not "both with detailed descriptions of Oppenheimer's scientific papers." And Caroline Moorehead reviewsOlivia Manning: A Woman at War (Oxford) by Deirdre David.